The Problem of Democracy

“… it seems to me far more important to stress that the organisms find, invent and reorganize their environments in the course of their search for a better world.” (Karl Popper, 1989/1994, viii.)

In mid-December, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser predicted that Islam will go through its “enlightenment,” achieving genuine democracy through a separation of religion from the secular details of statehood.

Islam is about 900 years late finding “enlightenment.” Jasser, therefore, is mad or a salesman but, in either case, not to be trusted.

Democracy is generally a scam, agreements between similar people strung together by PA systems, news broadcasts, and flash mobs that also united the Jacobins, The inept hide with their friends, the noisy claim victory and call themselves “progressive,” mutual spying grows, and kids turn in their parents. Agreements to unite on principles leads to demands that we all unite under rules called “policies” and taxes. Fascists, and Bolsheviks. OWS, Wal-Mart, the Beatles, Elvis, and mothers who fight for Air Jordans are simply the new Bolsheviks. So are the mullahs who insist their followers pray five times per day.

Castles, museums, and mosques are created by nobles, presidents, and mullahs who also make trails of statues, books and pictures. Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Alinsky, Wilson, and Roosevelt were variations of one theme. Ozymandias could never have been the last to put up his image. And, hopefully, in about a year, some 300 photographs of Obama will come down from the White House walls.

An entire society takes on the functional properties of Winner-Take-All, the third stage in the evolution of cultures and the final stage before collapse and resurrection and recycling. In Stage 4, there is a desperate dependence on last year’s politicians, preachers, teachers, and slogan makers. Frightened compliance puts food on your table, defection leads to hunger, cold, isolation, death, and, sometimes, to new religions and technologies.

The Enlightenment, for example, was never a good thing for the French and it was problematic for the rest of us. It sanctioned mob decisions, and about five years (July 1789-July, 1794) of mobs, murders, decapitations, burnings, and stonings. Socialism grew from nooses, guns, and guillotines and continues in modern Washington.

Each of us makes our own environment from the materials that are available. You not only make your world, your children use you to make theirs. You don’t teach them so much as provide food and walls while they take things from you. We all do so from the instant of conception and in a manner also seen in coral, spiders, crickets, and worms. Freedom is individual because it must be individual. It comes from the bottom-up…such has been true for 14 billion years for you, for me, for those coral, spiders, crickets, and worms and for the cat sleeping beside your feet…

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CATS is a conservative publication, almost free of advertising, and has appeared at least three times per week for the last six years. It consists of abstracts from the wider press, links to original sources, and sometimes, remarks by Jim Brody.